Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (25 page)

In
Strange Defeat
, the historian Marc Bloch searched for the causes of France’s humiliation—beyond the mistakes of the Army High
Command—in the weaknesses of a parliamentary system ruled by old men, undermined by a cynical civil service and ultimately destroyed by the polarization which followed the 1936 Popular Front era. Few were capable so early in the war of following him out of the depths of “bourgeois despair” in the search for a renewed and revived form of democracy, to “adapt ourselves to the claims of a new age.” For many the solution to France’s “decadence” lay in a rapprochement with Nazi Germany. Accepting the inevitable, wrote André Gide, was wisdom. Teilhard de Chardin consoled himself with the thought that “we are watching the birth, more than the death of a World.” Student enrolments for German classes at the Berlitz in Paris shot up from 939 in 1939 to 7,920 two years later; numbers taking English plummeted.
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The fall of France reverberated across the continent. “This afternoon more bad news,” wrote a Polish doctor on 14 June 1940. “Paris has fallen into German hands.” Two days later, he noted: “The news from France is terrible. People are emotionally broken. Some have lost all hope. What will happen now?” In Bucharest, Waldeck observed a more positive, if cautious, reaction. “The fall of France,” she wrote, “formed the climax to twenty years of failure of the promises of democracy to handle unemployment, inflation, deflation, labour unrest, party egoism and what not. Europe, tired of herself, and doubtful of the principles she had been living by, felt almost relieved to have everything settled … Hitler, Europe felt, was a smart guy—disagreeable but smart. He had gone far in making his country strong. Why not try it his way? That’s how Europeans felt in this summer of 1940.”
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Such relatively favourable attitudes towards the Germans were quick to disappear. In France and Belgium, for example, the mood swung round totally within two to three months, leaving collaborationists increasingly isolated. The Netherlands Union was disbanded by the Germans in 1941 after it was declared “untrustworthy.” This shift was to some extent the result of outrage at the behaviour of German soldiers and occupation forces, but it also stemmed from the changing international situation. Following the Battle of Britain it became clearer that the war would last longer than people had expected. And as we shall see, doubts over possible boundary shifts
and annexations across Europe also undermined faith in Hitler’s New Order.

LIVING IN HISTORIC TIMES

For the Germans themselves the mood was one of euphoria. The New Order had prevailed against the “protectors of a dying epoch.” More than ever before, they felt themselves to be living in “historic” times. After the march into Prague, Hitler declared that “in the course of its thousand-year past the Reich has already proved … it alone is called to resolve the problem of restoring order in central Europe.” On the eve of the western campaign he announced that “the struggle now beginning will decide the fate of the German nation for the next thousand years.” Goebbels hailed a “time without precedent” in which the “historic genius” of the Führer was helping build a “new Europe.” As the Wehrmacht thrust eastwards towards Moscow the Führer dreamed great dreams, of “the beauties of the Crimea, which we shall make accessible by means of an autobahn—for us Germans, that will be our Riviera. Crete is scorching and dry. Cyprus would be lovely, but we can reach the Crimea by road. Along that road lies Kiev! And Croatia, too, a tourists’ paradise for us. I expect that after the war there will be a great upsurge of rejoicing … What progress in the direction of the New Europe!”
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Chatting to Ciano in October 1941—perhaps the point of greatest excitement—the German Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, predicted that Hitler’s New Order in Europe would “ensure peace for a thousand years.” The cynical Italian could not let that pass. As he recorded in his diary: “I remarked that a thousand years is a long time. It is not easy to hang a couple of generations on the achievements of one man, even if he is a genius. Ribbentrop ended by making a concession: ‘Let’s make it a century,’ he said.”
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But if the former champagne salesman could not resist the chance of making a bargain, the Führer himself had no such doubts. “When National Socialism has ruled long enough,” he declared one night after dinner, “it will no longer be possible to conceive of a form of life different from ours.”
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No one in Berlin, then, doubted that a historic opportunity had been presented to the Third Reich. The question remained, however,
how best to exploit it. What the soldiers had won, the politicians must now govern. Yet the land mass controlled by the Germans at the end of 1941 was staggeringly large—stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the fringes of the Sahara desert, from the Atlantic and the Pyrenees to the Ukraine. A quick succession of
Blitzkrieg
offensives had suddenly brought Hitler into possession of a vast empire much of which he had never planned to conquer.

From
Mein Kampf
onwards, the proposed site of the future Greater German Empire had been clear; it lay in the East, roughly covering the territory Germany had briefly controlled in 1918 after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. “We are putting an end to the perpetual German march towards the South and West of Europe,” Hitler had written in
Mein Kampf
, “and turning our eyes towards the land in the East.” The Ukraine was to be turned through German colonization into “one of the loveliest gardens of the world”; it was, according to an SS leaflet, “badly exploited, fertile soil of black earth that could be a Paradise, a California of Europe.”
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Poland would provide a connecting link to the East and a source of labour—an
Arbeitsreich
for the
Herrenvolk
, as Hitler put it shortly after the invasion.
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The dismemberment of the country and brutal treatment of its population after September 1939 showed what methods would be used to this end. Yet what about Scandinavia, the Low Countries, the Balkans, even France? These areas figured less prominently in Hitler’s thinking. All the signs are that at the end of 1939 he was reluctant to take on further military commitments. Why bother to invade countries which could be intimidated into alliance and acquiescence? Diplomatic pressure successfully ensured German control of vital resources in Romania, Hungary and Sweden. In early 1940 Hitler resisted as long as he could the idea of invading Norway until he became convinced of the threat British plans posed to Scandinavian ore shipments to Germany.
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France had to be knocked out of the war, of course, but its role in the New Order remained unclear. Greece could probably have remained neutral had not the botched Italian invasion brought in the British and demanded a German response. Plans to invade Yugoslavia had to be made on the run when news came in from Belgrade that the pro-Axis government had been toppled by a military coup.

German policy towards many of the defeated states was at first deliberately provisional: their fate was not to be decided until the war was over. Goebbels insisted in May 1940, on the eve of the attack on France, that there was to be
no
media discussion of war aims at all; during the war, these were to be formulated simply as “a just and durable peace and
Lebensraum
for the German people.” Such a policy reflected the wishes of the Nazi leadership. Hitler insisted that declarations of war aims were beside the point: “As far as our might extends we can do what we like, and what lies beyond our power we cannot do in any case.”
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Although in the summer of 1940 the Wehrmacht and the Foreign Office were both sympathetic to the French desire to conclude a peace treaty with the Third Reich, Hitler’s disapproval blocked the way. The German generals in the Netherlands had assumed that the defeated country would remain independent and were taken aback by Hitler’s decision to place it under civilian rule. But the Party and the SS were attracted by the racial affinity of the Dutch and swayed by dreams of annexation in order to reconstitute the Holy Roman Empire, and Hitler had certainly not repudiated such ideas.
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West European statesmen, alarmed by the German annexation of chunks of Poland and Czechoslovakia, sought reassurance that the integrity of their states would be respected, and their sovereignty restored. They naturally did not believe the numerous German declarations to this effect in the absence of solid peace treaties with Berlin. Deluded King Leopold of Belgium had a disappointing interview with Hitler. Vidkun Quisling raised the subject at least three times but got nowhere; indeed, on the last occasion he was told that Hitler wanted no further discussion of the subject. German officials in the Foreign Office and the Wehrmacht who tried to argue for grants of autonomy—for France, for example, and after 1941, for Estonia—were no more successful.
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The question of peace settlements banished to the indefinite future, the Third Reich covered the New Europe with a patchwork of more or less provisional occupation regimes. At one extreme, certain countries were dismembered, their national identity entirely suppressed. Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia endured this approach; their very names were to be erased from the map. “In the future,” said
Goebbels in the summer of 1940, “we shall not refer any more to the ‘Government-General for the Occupied Polish Territories’ but—without expressly drawing attention to this—simply to the ‘Government-General’; in this way, just as is gradually happening in the Protectorate (of Bohemia-Moravia), which is now simply called the Protectorate, the situation will clarify itself automatically. The population in those territories merely has the task of making our work easier.” Luxembourg, too, was all but annexed to the Reich and any reference to the “Grand Duchy” or the “country” of Luxembourg was banned. The juridical status of such countries was left unclear, even if their ultimate future was not.
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The customary German procedure was to appoint military or civil commanders, who ruled through the existing native civil service. In that war within a war which was the bureaucratic chaos of the Third Reich, these territories became so many fiefdoms, subject to competing claims from different ministries and ruled with varying degrees of success. The Danish government was most effective in preserving public order, perhaps because it was least disrupted by occupation. The king and parliament were allowed to function and in the beginning enjoyed—in theory at least—a considerable measure of sovereignty: as a result a total German staff of fewer than one hundred kept control of the entire country; in France, Greece, the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, Serbia and Norway puppet governments interposed a fig-leaf of respectability between the conquerors and the civil service. In the Netherlands, a civilian Reich Commissioner governed through the Secretary-Generals of the civil service, while in Belgium the Secretary-Generals answered to the military authorities. Nominally independent governments in Croatia and Slovakia were, in fact, clearly subordinate to German wishes; Axis partners such as Finland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary had slightly more room for manoeuvre.

Hitler’s imagination was captured by the example of the British in India. Their model of imperial rule, such as he conceived it, struck him as admirable. After the invasion of the Soviet Union his mind returned again and again to the problem of how the British ruled the subcontinent with a handful of men; for him the Ukraine was “that new Indian Empire”; the Eastern Front would become Germany’s
North-West Frontier where generations of officers would win their spurs and preserve the martial virtues of the Aryan race. But the Führer had little understanding of British imperial techniques of governance; he was critical of the laxness of British racial attitudes and their willingness to permit some degree of local political autonomy.
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The India parallel cropped up on one of the very rare occasions when Nazi war aims were briefly aired in public. This was in a speech made by the prominent radio commentator Hans Fritzsche, almost certainly following Hitler’s instructions, in October 1941 when a Russian defeat seemed assured. Telling the foreign press that the war had been decided, Fritzsche went on to lay out Germany’s political plans: Europe was to become economically self-sufficient under German leadership. The Germans themselves would have to be trained in the “imperial European idea” and prepared for continual minor military operations in the East analogous to the problems the British faced in India. “As for the nations dominated by us,” he said, “our language to them will become very much freer and colder. There will, of course, be no question of some crummy little state obstructing European peace by some special requests or special demands—in such an event it would get a sharp reminder of its task in Europe.”
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Such a harsh vision reflected contemporary Nazi criticisms of liberal international law. Carl Schmitt, for instance, argued that the conquered territories now formed Germany’s own
Grossraum
. Just as the Monroe Doctrine was supposed to justify the non-intervention of other powers in the Western Hemisphere, he wrote, so Germany had won the right to rule Europe. Above all, it had won the right to govern by new rules: the old system of international law with its universal pretensions and its basis in the relations of sovereign states had to be replaced by a genuinely National Socialist jurisprudence of “Volk Law.” Not all peoples, according to Schmitt, were equally capable of bearing the weight of a modern constitutional state. Departing abruptly from the liberal notion—as enshrined in the League of Nations—that all states were sovereign and juridically equal, Schmitt declared that a “high degree of organization” and “voluntary discipline” were required in the modern world. The Nazi rulers of the Netherlands and the General Government both indicated publicly that the era of “absolute independence” was over.
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